the parlour.
“Your mother – my wife,” said he, “is very ill, and I am sending for the doctor. The horse is yoking. There is another woman in Driepps who – God help her! – will be no better this night, but I wish in truth her case was ours, and that it was you who lay among the heather.”
He began pacing up and down the floor, his eyes bent, his hands continually wringing, his heart bursting, as it were, with sighs and the dry sobs of the utmost wretchedness. As for me, I must have been clean gyte (as the saying goes), for my attention was mostly taken up with the tassel of his nightcap that bobbed grotesquely on his brow. I had not seen it since, as a child, I used to share his room.
“What! what!” he cried at last piteously, “have ye never a word to say? Are ye dumb?” He ran at me and caught me by the collar of the coat and tried to shake me in an anger, but I felt it no more than I had been a stone.
“What did ye do it for? What in heaven’s name did ye quarrel on?”
“It was – it was about a girl,” I said, reddening even at that momentous hour to speak of such a thing to him.
“A girl!” he repeated, tossing up his hands. “Keep us! Hoo lang are ye oot o’ daidlies? Well! well!” he went on, subduing himself and prepared to listen. I wished the tassel had been any other colour than crimson, and hung fairer on the middle of his forehead; it seemed to fascinate me. And he, belike, forgot that I was there, for he thought, I knew, continually of his wife, and he would stop his feverish pacing on the floor, and hearken for a sound from the room where she was quartered with the maid. I made no answer.
“Well, well!” he cried again fiercely, turning upon me. “Out with it; out with the whole hellish transaction, man!”
And then I told him in detail what before my mother I had told in a brief abstract.
How that I had met young Borland coming down the breast of the brae at Kirkillstane last night and —
“Last night!” he cried. “Are ye havering? I saw ye go to your bed at ten, and your boots were in the kitchen.”
It was so, I confessed. I had gone to my room but not to bed, and had slipped out by the window when the house was still, with Uncle Andrew’s shoes.
“Oh, lad!” he cried, “it’s Andy’s shoes you stand in sure enough, for I have seen him twenty years syne in the plight that you are in this night. Merciful heaven! what dark blotch is in the history of this family of ours that it must ever be embroiled in crimes of passion and come continually to broken ends of fortune? I have lived stark honest and humble, fearing the Lord; the covenants have I kept, and still and on it seems I must beget a child of the Evil One!”
And how, going out thus under cover of night, I had meant to indulge a boyish fancy by seeing the light of Isobel Fortune’s window. And how, coming to the Kirkillstane, I met David Borland leaving the house, whistling cheerfully.
“Oh, Paul, Paul!” cried my father, “I mind of you an infant on her knees that’s ben there, and it might have been but yesterday your greeting in the night wakened me to mourn and ponder on your fate.” And how Borland, divining my object there, and himself new out triumphant from that cheerful house of many daughters, made his contempt for the Spoiled Horn too apparent.
“You walked to the trough-stane when you were a twelvemonth old,” said my father with the irrelevance of great grief, as if he recalled a dead son’s infancy.
And how, maddened by some irony of mine, he had struck a blow upon my chest, and so brought my challenge to something more serious and gentlemanly than a squalid brawl with fists upon the highway.
I stopped my story; it seemed useless to be telling it to one so much preoccupied with the thought of the woman he loved. His lips were open, his eyes were constant on the door.
But “Well! Well!” he cried again eagerly, and I resumed.
Of how I had come home, and crept into my guilty chamber and lay the long night through, torn by grief and anger, jealousy and distress. And how evading the others of the household as best I could that day, I had in the afternoon at the hour appointed gone out with Uncle Andrew’s pistol.
My father moaned – a waefu’ sound!
And found young Borland up on the moor before me with such another weapon, his face red byordinary, his hands and voice trembling with passion.
“Poor lad, poor lad!” my father cried blurting the sentiment as he had been a bairn.
How we tossed a coin to decide which should be the first to fire, and Borland had won the toss, and gone to the other end of our twenty paces with vulgar menaces and “Spoiled Horn” the sweetest of his epithets.
“Poor lad! he but tried to bluster down the inward voice that told him the folly o’t,” said father.
And how Borland had fired first. The air was damp. The sound was like a slamming door.
“The door of hope shut up for him, poor dear,” cried father.
And how he missed me in his trepidation that made his hand that held the pistol so tremble that I saw the muzzle quiver even at twenty paces.
“And then you shot him deliberately I M cried my father.
“No, no,” I cried at that, indignant. “I aimed without a glance along the barrel: the flint flashed; the prime missed fire, and I was not sorry, but Borland cried ‘Spoiled Horn’ braggingly, and I cocked again as fast as I could, and blindly jerked the trigger. I never thought of striking him. He fell with one loud cry among the rushes.”
“Murder, by God!” cried my father, and he relapsed into a chair, his body all convulsed with horror.
I had told him all this as if I had been in a delirium, or as if it were a tale out of a book, and it was only when I saw him writhing in his chair and the tassel shaking over his eyes, I minded that the murderer was me. I made for the door; up rose my father quickly and asked me what I meant to do.
I confessed I neither knew nor cared.
“You must thole your assize,” said he, and just as he said it the clatter of the mare’s hoofs sounded on the causey of the yard, and he must have minded suddenly for what object she was saddled there.
“No, no,” said he, “you must flee the country. What right have you to make it any worse for her?”
“I have not a crown in my pocket,” said I.
“And I have less,” he answered quickly. “Where are you going? No, no, don’t tell me that; I’m not to know. There’s the mare saddled, I meant Sandy to send the doctor from the Mearns, but you can do that. Bid him come here as fast as he can.”
“And must I come back with the mare?” I asked, reckless what he might say to that, though my life depended on it.
“For the sake of your mother,” he answered, “I would rather never set eyes on you or the beast again; she’s the last transaction between us, Paul Greig.” And then he burst in tears, with his arms about my neck.
Ten minutes later I was on the mare, and galloping, for all her ailing leg, from Hazel Den as if it were my own loweing conscience. I roused Dr. Clews at the Mearns, and gave him my father’s message. “Man,” said he, holding his chamber light up to my face, “man,
